De-mated NiobiCon connectors (Courtesy of Northrop Grumman)
NIOBICON™ CONNECTORS
WHEN ELECTRICITY AND WATER DO MIX By Richie Enzmann – ROV Planet
All underwater electrical connectors on the market try to make electrical contact materials that are used in air work underwater by keeping water away. For this purpose, other manufacturers have been using O-rings, seals, and oil to keep the water from touching the electrical contacts. Northrop Grumman took a different approach to this and the NiobiCon™ connectors were invented.
Jim Windgassen is the co-inventor of NiobiCon and an engineer at Northrop Grumman in Annapolis, Maryland. Several years ago, Windgassen worked on a proposal effort that involved recharging autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) using inductive charging which was very cumbersome. The inductive charger occupied a lot of space inside the vehicle, and it wasn’t that efficient. Windgassen, frustrated by the limitations of inductive charging, started going down a different path and talked to a colleague, friend and co-inventor, Harvey Hack, who had done some work with connectors in the past using niobium, but purely for its corrosion resistance characteristics. When Hack mentioned niobium, this made Windgassen think about how an electrical device called a tantalum capacitor works, and that was the inspiration for NiobiCon.
Hack, Windgassen and a third inventor, Jeff Matejka, also an engineer at Northrop Grumman, fabricated a crude working prototype and tested it. It worked surprisingly well, so they got a small amount of internal funding and made it into a more professional design that they demonstrated. During one of their demonstrations, they met Keith Johanns who had recently been hired to commercialize technologies from Northrop Grumman. Hack and Windgassen had been struggling on their own trying to advance this technology; Johanns was the missing piece of the team and this project has really blossomed since.
PHYSICAL PRINCIPLES AND CONNECTOR DESIGN So, what is NiobiCon? It’s a novel way of achieving underwater wet-mate connections that leverages the material properties of transition metals, which include metals such as tantalum,
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